"Not bad, but gets old quickly"

Star Wars: Empire at War -- Forces of Corruption

Story 3/10The story is lacking in any sort of interest. Zann gets sprung from jail and builds a large criminal organization. But the campaign is like, ten missions or so, so you don't really have to worry about it.

Graphics 9/10The graphics are decent if you're willing to jack up the settings to high. It gets polygonal at lower resolution/geometry detail, but it's livable. The Battlecam is neat, but it's a bit irrelevant because if you're fighting, then you have to control your units, and can't waste your time looking at the camera. Also, sometimes the camera is [slow or limited in intellectual, emotional, or academic progress] and focuses on space with nothing in it, or like, one ship flying around. But you can still zoom in on anything and that's kinda cool. You can rotate the camera, but that sometimes screws with perception, especially when combined with zoom. In other words, the graphics are the same as Empire at War.

Sound 8/10Well, the music is the original music from the movies, which sort of depends on how much you liked the original movies. The voices of those who weren't in the movies are ok, but some of the characters are done by sound-alike people, and it's not usually distracting, but when I hear Darth Vader, the voice's dissimilarity is somewhat distracting. Otherwise, the people say mostly interesting things that are fun to say in real life to make people think you're crazy. "Going on my attack run!" etc. Some units only say one thing if you're flying in a nebula, "We're flying blind in that nebula!" and it's really annoying when you're doing micro in a nebula. But otherwise, the audio is fine.

Gameplay 5/10The gameplay is... eh. It's real time strategy, except it's not like Starcraft/Warcraft/Command & Conquer because you build at the galactic level and fight at the planet level, meaning that destroying your factories is pretty much impossible because you can build on any planet. The game adds on a ZC campaign, which is mediocre and short. I was actually expecting another Rebel/Empire campaign, and was a bit disapointed. The Galactic Conquest and Skirmish Battles are decent, but come with one drawback which is often complained about -- the ZC is way overpowered.

I was playing a skirmish space battle yesterday (July '07) as the rebels, and I'm rather decent at the first Empire at War, but as rebels against the ZC on hard, I was pretty much wrecked. They start out with the StarVipers, which are good against fighters, and they have Buzz Droids as well, which tear through fighters pretty quickly. There's a new patch (well, not really that new.) for the game, which improve the Rebellion and the Empire, but the ZC are still the guys for the money, especially with those Canderous Tanks.

It's slightly better matched on land. It's easier to shoot down the Assault Speeders now. In the EAW, you needed to build air turrets which are useless against everything else or AT-AAs which are also pretty much useless against anything else (Well, AT-ATs if you got lucky, but the Speeders can outmaneuver them.) But the ZC Canderous Tanks are sort of overpowered, but it's more fairly matched than it was in space.

One of the painful features of the galactic conquest mode is the annoyance of corruption. The AI will decide to corrupt planets and you have to play whack-a-mole with their defilers. You could just let them be corrupt, which I tried when I first had to deal with it, but they send armies through your space and blow up stuff on the ground, which messes with your income. Also, they'll cause certain planets to revolt, which means you have to rebuild stuff over them again. It's annoying to play against, and not that fun to play with.